Journey to Nothing

[LastThursday]

The waves come in up the beach, I breathe out then in, I open myself up to majesty of the world. 

The waves go back out, I breathe in then out, I go within and see the majesty of myself.

The gull soars on the water, I breathe out then in, I spread my wings free in flight.

The tree stands in the sands, I breathe in then out, I stretch my roots feel my might.

I am the water, I am the birds, I am the trees, I am the sands.

The waves come in up the beach, I breathe out then in, I open myself up to majesty of the world. 

The waves go back out, I breathe in then out, I go within and know the majesty of myself.

[LastThursday]

When was the first time you did a thing?

We don't think about a lot of the things we do every day or even occasionally. Each thing had to start somewhere and somewhen, but most of it is lost to memory. Some things are memorable enough to stick in the memory for whatever reasons. I have a feeling that these memories need to be fed and watered at times, they've stuck around for their own inherent reasons. Here's a few of my firsts:

I remember vaguely being helped by one of my parents cutting out shapes from magazines and making a collage. I was probably about three or so. Ok, it wasn't all me, but it was my first bit of art. Even the greats have helpers! I've liked art ever since, and was good at school, but it never really gripped my imagination as much as other things. I do have an artistic side to me though, and it started then.

I first started coding when I nagged my parents to death to buy me one of those new fangled home computers. They caved in for my tenth birthday, and since it's close to Christmas, I only got the one big present that year. I was ecstatic. The last time I coded was yesterday, as it's my job. I can honestly say that one present changed my life. I still love coding 38 years later!

I first learned to read when I was around four I think. I distinctly remember being fascinated by letters and symbols of all sorts at a young age. I remember asking my dad what all these little letters meant, and he patiently described that each letter had a different sound and went through them all. Luckily for me Spanish is pretty much phonetic, and I found it easy to remember. My dad recalls that I learned to read overnight and I've been reading every since. A few years later I learned to read English. And, I still enjoy reading and playing with words very much - that's why I'm journaling I think.

Around the time I learned to read, I used to play with my dad's calculator. Electronic calculators were a novelty in the 70's. I had an intense fascination with the thing. It engaged the senses for me. It was tactile with chunky buttons that made a satisfying click, and the display was glowing red filaments, which seemed alive to me. Again, my dad had to cater to my curiosity and explain numbers and arithmetic and trig. The trig I never really understood, it was too much for my young brain. But the numbers and arithmetic I could understand well enough. I would click away for hours. To this day I love the abstraction of maths, and I did Engineering at university for that reason. It's also the reason I was so taken with computers.

Around nine or ten years old. My parents decided to buy me and my sister an electronic organ. I remember distinctly going to the nearest shopping centre and looking around in the music shop there. I'm not sure why they decided to buy one, it certainly didn't come from us kids. Saying that, my dad was/is musical having played the guitar on and off forever. And I would have tried playing his guitar at an earlier age, and he taught me how to shape chords and stuff, but the memory is too vague. The first time I played a keyboard was then however. I have had a keyboard of some description my entire life since. The only hiatus was at university, but then I regularly used to jam in the music rooms there. I would say I'm a reasonable player, and given the right training I would have been amazing - and I sort of regret this. The last time I played was a few days ago.

A bit later at age 12 or 13 I wrote my first poem. This would have been in English class and my poem was entered into a competition, I think I came close by getting into the shortlist, but I didn't win. From memory the subject was nuclear war, which was definitely a theme in the 80's. What a happy subject, not  I've written occasional poetry ever since. Even though I get a kick out of it, I've never really pursued it to any degree. Like playing an instrument, it just makes me happy, I don't care if other people like it or not.

I thank my first girlfriend's dad (when I was 15) for indirectly getting me into classical music. It was the done thing in the 80's that if you wanted to seem educated, you had to have collections of things, mostly Encyclopedia Brittanica. Lucky for me he also had a collections of classical music tapes. I mean it was just the usual greats: Handel's Water Music, Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, Vivaldi's Four Seasons. But I spent many an hour sat on the floor with headphones on listening to those tapes (which I made copies of for myself). It was a revelation, before that point I knew of composers and had heard snippets of the music in adverts and so on, but to put everything together was great. I've had a great admiration for classical music ever since. At university I even introduced a friend to classical music, and he became even more fanatic about it than me. I'm sure he had five different versions of the Four Seasons at some point. And so it goes on. I especially, like classical piano, for obvious reasons.

And how could I forget sex? Well I had to wait until I was 19 for that and my then girlfriend's bed in student accommodation on campus. Although, I had a near miss at around 16 or 17 with my previous girlfriend, although if it had happened and her dad had found out, I would have been murdered. Although, I suspect he knew exactly what was going on. 

Lastly, the first time I got drunk and I mean properly drunk was in fact the behest of that first girlfriend's dad. It was my 18th birthday, and it was his local. Before that I had drank watered down wine with dinner (being Spanish and all), but this was a proper sesh. Being like a bean pole and a short guy at that age it didn't take a lot before I was steaming drunk. I did throw my guts up afterwards, all over his newly laid wooden flooring. I was banished to the school were I spent the night on hard lino flooring. The dad was the school caretaker and the mum a cleaner there. They lived in a building adjacent to the Victorian school building where I went to school. Although this would have been in the Christmas break, so the school was empty. My first ever hangover was not pleasant and I've never learned the lesson since. 

 

[LastThursday]

Note to self: experiments in dream levitation.

[LastThursday]

There's a number of tropes I suffer from in my dreams: trains, sex, exploration and levitation. Deconstructing each one would be interesting in itself, but I'll talk about levitation.

There seems to be two basic types of levitation, levitation of myself and levitation of objects. In my dreams the self-levitation is the most prevalent. Again, this splits into two types: forward motion and vertical motion. The forward motion usually starts off by walking normally, but then at some point there is a realisation that I'm floating along, legs tucked up a little and a few feet off the ground. This sort of levitation feels effortless and very natural. If I wake up soon after having this type of dream, I feel a sense of disappointment that it's not possible in real waking life. That part of me that believes in magick knows it's possible in real waking life too.

The other type of self-levitation is the vertical type. This is different. It seems to take a concerted effort to maintain. There's a sense of wanting to take in the whole scene, so I focus on shooting myself vertically upwards. Sometimes it works and I go high high up, sometimes I only go up a few yards. But it's unstable, I have to think hard to maintain my height, but nearly always I sink back down again. Very rarely I can go high up enough to go over buildings, although most times there's very little lateral motion. There's never any acrobatics, I'm always upright, I never fly like Superman would.

What about object levitation? This is extremely rare and like the vertical type takes concerted effort. I can only think of one clear dreaming instance, but there may have been others. In this particular instance I was trying to "float" playing cards by lightly flicking them away from me. When I managed it, they would float an inch or two above the table, and drift slowly across until they fell.

In both the levitating objects and vertical levitation there is a sense of concentrated intention on my part, and I have to get myself into a certain mental state in order to achieve it. The levitation in these cases comes from me. In the forward levitation case, it comes from outside of me, just like walking doesn't require mental effort either.

I could laugh it all off as dream stuff, but there are definite "laws" to dream levitation and there's a strong sense that it would be perfectly possible to do awake, given the right mental state and lots of practice. The only thing is wasting my time on something that is probably impossible: why invent aircraft and maglev trains? I'm not sure what's more deluded, trying to levitate or giving up and not trying to levitate?

 

[LastThursday]

After many years of soaking in this spirituality stuff and what Leo and others teach in general, something is bubbling away beneath the surface. I'll spell it out, it's my unease at nihilism and talk of the void and nothingness and getting rid of the ego. I'll call it zeroism the sake of lumping it altogether.

I understand at a tacit level what all this zeroism is about. Quickly: being attached to a something creates suffering, and a something is pure illusion or more accurately it is not at the root of reality. Firstly, suffering is the human condition, there is suffering and all the things associated with it at all levels, great and small, simple and complex. Pushing past suffering is one of the greatest means for actualising yourself. Secondly, there appears to be more to reality than meets the eye, the immediate sensation of a material world with objects and people is not to be trusted - it is a house of cards which can be toppled over and it should be toppled over - so that you can truly be spiritually actualised - enlightened or awakened.

Non-dual speak frankly bores me. For every person that says something is occuring, there is someone that says nothing is occuring. I've even argued myself for nothing going on, using logical thought. It's like eating strawberry ice cream and then someone saying "you're wrong there is no strawberry ice cream, there's nothing there". This is just rubbish.

I can't vouch for the experiences of others, because I'm not them (yes I am a separate sentient human being), but strawberry ice cream exists. If I go to my local shop and buy it, I can experience it any time I want. And that's my point.

Consciousness or whatever this is exists in all its glory, it is here, right here, right now. To deny that existence or argue against it or to say it's anything different to what it is, is utter delusion. There is meaning to reality, there is something, there is movement and colour, there is ice cream - because reality is all of it, it's allowable, it's not illusion, it's not maya, it's not nothingness or whatever. I exist, because I experience myself existing. Stuff is happening because I experience it (I can feel you all cringing now). I can accept that reality is just experiencing itself and that an "I" is unnecessary, but the fact remains that there is an "I" right here at this moment.

Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of delusion and ignorance but this is to all to do with the content of reality. However, reality itself is not delusion, illusion, nothingness, or anything else. Reality is exactly as it presents itself right now. If reality presents itself differently in ten minutes' time then that is reality. It's really very very simple. Why all the unnecessary misdirection of zeroism?

Trying to overcome suffering is really about utility and actualisation. Actualisation is 99% about the content of reality and deconstructing everything, so it is all utility. You're actualising because it serves you. You are the one that wants to get enlightened, telling yourself otherwise is silly.

After a while it should become blatantly obvious that everything is constructed in some way: it's made of parts, it has rules, it fits within a greater whole. Most of human drama stems from the inability to extricate itself from its constructions. But the fact remains that constructions are reality, they're not illusions, they are simply things that can be shown to be arbitrary - that being the greatest single realisation to have. Yes the content of reality is completely arbitrary, but it still exists, I'm here to witness it. You get me?

 

[LastThursday]

One of the biggest hurdles I overcame is having a victim mindset. For a long time I felt like I wanted to lash out and put everyone in their place, and tell them how stupid they had been for treating me badly and neglecting me. This applied to my parents, siblings, family, friends, and in fact everyone. Although, I never did confront anyone directly, I instead just withdrew myself from everyone. If I couldn't be treated well, they didn't deserve me in their lives.

I think watching one of Leo's videos on the subject was the tipping point. That was a few years ago. I then knew I was being an ungrateful selfish bastard. I'm still one, but I'm an "aware ungrateful selfish bastard" lol. The awareness I've gained is that once everything is stripped back, I feel a sense of lack of love. The word "lack" is interesting because it presupposes that I'm actually entitled to love from people, which I'm actually not. That realisation has felt like a dagger to the heart, but it was also both sobering and liberating.

Most of the love we/I want is conditional. We want to be loved in a way we understand. It's not enough that we simply get love in whatever form it comes, it has to be meaningful to us directly. Before I even stumbled upon Actualized I had a form of hypnotherapy. I was in a low place at the time. One of the things that emphatically stuck in my mind about the sessions was that I was actually lovable. At the time it struck me as bloody obvious, but it also had a deep effect on me - it was something that I'd forgotten - I felt I'd spent a long time not being loved. That forgetfulness had infected my very being, I really didn't love myself very much either I'd forgotten how to and maybe I never really learned how to in the first place.

I opened my eyes gradually to the snippets of love around me. Despite being withdrawn myself, friends and family would still contact me, that was love. I would just turn up to see me my mum, and she would feed me and let me sleep over and would be happy to see me - that was love. The guy in the coffee shop who knows what coffee I order, that's love. The friend who buys me a CD or gives me a book for my birthday, that's love. The sister who prompts me now and then, despite me snubbing her for five years, that's love. The strangers who gave me their condolences when my mum passed away, that's love. The friend who emphatically said he would be there with me at my mum's funeral, that's love. Love is everywhere.

What triggered me to write this is that there have been a few events recently that jarred me: marriages, pregnancies, people getting on with their lives. These people were/are significant to me in one way or another.  I feel both envy, out on a limb, and as if I'm simply observing the world doing its thing without it ever involving me. I want and need to stop feeling detached and blowing in the breeze and unloved, instead I need to be in the flow of the river. But for that I need to change my mindset, but I'm not there yet.

I find this amusing and insightful to my condition:

 

[LastThursday]

I was reading on Reddit stories about disappearing object phenomenon (DOP). This is where objects are put down, such as keys, and they completely vanish and are nowhere to be found, only to turn up later in the same spot they were put down. 

And as if someone were having a cosmic joke, it happened to me the day after. I'm not prone to losing stuff, I like to think I pay attention. I use four sturdy bags to do my fortnightly supermarket shop with. So, I park up at the supermarket, reach into my boot and only find three bags. Normally I fold the bags vertically together and carry them under my arm, this also keeps them together in my boot. So I'm stood there, wracking my brains trying to think wtf I did with the one missing bag - nothing comes. My bags shuttle between my flat and my car boot, not much scope for losing a bright orange bag. I could have conceivably lost it carrying them back to my car, down two flights to my garage. But if so, I should have noticed it on the way back up. I've used the same bags for probably a year or so, I'm careful. Who knows!

Universe I want my bag back! 

[LastThursday]

Aqui estoy jugando con un sueño, dentro el sueño, solo en el sueño. ¿Donde estas? A qualquier esquina que miro, tu no estas alli, solo yo. Siempre yo, reflejando en el sol, la tierra, el aire y en mi cuerpo. Asi es, cada vez que te busco.

[Preety_India]

I hope you get your bag back. 

Sometimes stuff like that happened to me as well. 

And I was attributed it to absent mindedness. 

I have this OCD of checking my bag several times whenever I'm out shopping just to keep checking for my wallet, phone and keys. 

It can be a headache but when I come back home and everything comes home safe, it's a relief. 

Just a suggestion. You can take zip ties and tie in the straps of one bag to another, so they remain attached all the time, easy to handle and carry around without having to remember to carry each. 

[LastThursday]

Thanks @Preety_India it's more of an irritation than a thing. I'm not OCD but I do like to have everything in its place, and a place for everything, ok maybe a little OCD lol.

[LastThursday]

I dabble in a lot of things. I have a fascination for trains and for maps - I'm such a boy. I also have an eye for aesthetics.  I thought I'd try my hand at re-designing the Tokyo subway map. I started a project in 2007 to redesign the London Underground map (subway), just for kicks. At the time I only had Paint, which was barely adequate for the task. I came across the image again recently and thought I'd try my hand using more professional illustrator software (albeit free: Inkscape). It took a few weeks to re-implement the 2007 design, and it looks a lot more professional:

Apart from a few more tweaks it's finished. I have no idea where and if I should publish my map to the world, or I'll just sit on it another 14 years! Anyway I decided to try another map and thought the Tokyo subway would be interesting to do in the same style:

Berlin next after this one. I'm getting obsessed...

[LastThursday]

More good stuff here, give it a watch:

 

[LastThursday]

There is no observer of reality. If this is true then where does the impression of there being an observer come from, and why is this everyone's default mode: thinking that there's an observer?

You could look to language as a starting point. English and many other languages (at least European ones) divide words functionally. When an action is taking place, there is the person performing or initiating the action and there is the person (or thing) receiving or has the action done to them. Some quick examples are:

LastThursday eats biscuits

Cats are scared by cucumbers

LastThursday is obsessed with food

So how does this fit in with the idea of an observer, observing reality? Well, the verb "observe" grammatically works like the above examples:

LastThursday observes reality

Is language then the source of the idea of an observer of reality? Has language distorted reality? The logical question to ask is, why does language have this structure to verbs?

I think that at the bottom of it there is the idea that an action has to be initiated by someone, or at least have a cause. All actions need causes. The role of language is very often to convey narrative. Narrative is the idea that things start off in one state, and then morphed into another state by a sequence of actions. To have any change at all in a narrative account, there need to be effects to every action. For example when we say "Susan took the kids to school", the effect is obvious: the kids ended up at school. This need for narrative and the consequences of it, is built right into most languages. Nearly all verbs need to have an initiator and an effect (or receiver of the action).

But why is language this way in the first place? We could have had a language where actions just happen without being initiated or have any effects. Here's some examples of what this is like:

Walking

Singing

Eats

Observes

Even with these examples, we are so used to the rules of English, that we still imagine these actions being carried out by someone or something. But truly the examples would be completely disconnected from the idea of a performer of the actions. We're getting into strange territory. It seems like language would collapse without distinguishing objects (nouns) and actions (verbs). What the above examples are implying is that we would only have one category: nounverbs. Luckily English has these nounverbs, they're called nominalisations. A word like "love" is a nounverb. It's a word that is actually a verb (loving) converted into use as a noun (love).

So what is the nounverb of something like "LastThursday observes reality"? This would collapse into something like "Realising", i.e. reality doing its thing. See how in a nounverb like "Realising", there is no initiator and no effect, it is an action that simply continuously happens. This is closer to reality, stuff around us is just happening, it is all one giant happening (note, nounverb). Reality really doesn't need an obverver for it to happen to itself.

So the idea of an observer simply evolved out of the conventions of language, and "you" have been duped by it. The "observer" is simply a convenience for conveying narrative when speaking.

[LastThursday]

I very much operate in phases - sometimes recurring. Some new thought arises and grips my interest and I feel that I need to explore it fully. I don't have a filter for my exploration, if the interest has enough energy behind it then I go for it. In that sense I think I find myself to be quite different from people around me. I find it hard to quantify the difference though, I can see that other people have hobbies and interests, but they seem to be narrow in subject matter and long lasting. For example, someone may have interest in martial arts, and they pursue that regularly and as a matter of course. I too have long lasting interests such as playing keyboards, and information technology in general - but I see them as different from my "phases".

By phase I mean interests and not some state-of-my-life type thing. At the moment it's playing Chess online. I don't have any expectation for how long I'm going to pursue this phase, only that I want to see if I can improve my playing and have fun. Another one is the subway map design I mentioned in another post. For that I had an idea based on the Moscow subway map, and wondered if I could run with it, just to see how things pan out. Another maybe, was to write a compiler for an 8-bit machine - which I mostly achieved. 

One of the beautiful things about exploring ideas in an unfettered way, is that as well as the joy in it, the side effects are always beneficial in some way. For example with Chess one side effect is to improve my quick logical thinking. With map design, I'm learning how to use illustrator software - so one day when there's a need to design a new logo for work or whatever, I can now step up say "yeah I'll do that".  And that's the point, trying out many different types of activity is both fun and gives you a lot of different skills, which can synergise at some point in the future. I don't see anyone else working this way. Too many times I've found myself using the skills I learnt in some phase or other. If you want to be a renaissance man or woman, this is how to go about it. Mastery crystallises out of that synergy of experiences. Just ask Newton or Da Vinci. This is why I'm so attracted by this forum and Leo's work. 

Edited August 31, 2021 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

Falling in love in slow motion.

I don't know if this is more of a hypothetical idea. I don't feel as though it's happened to me as such before, but it seems interesting to follow its trail as a thought.

The starting point for it is attraction. Something or someone in your environment grabs your attention and you are attracted - I mean grabbing your attention and attraction are basically the same thing. It would seem to be a binary response in that way, either it grabs you or it doesn't. But binary or not, there is always an associated intensity to attraction and also attraction is multifaceted, often it's a jumble of different aspects that attract us to someone or something. Ok...

What's love in the context of attraction then? Well maybe love is just repeated attraction. In time we learn to associate the bare attractive qualities in a person say, with a warm fuzzy feeling of... of... I don't know, I can't think of any other word than "love", alright, cozy familiarity. What I'm suggesting is that love takes its time to manifest and grows from the seed of attraction. This is the difference between love and lust, lust is just strong attraction, it's more of a Pavlovian response: attraction, lust, attraction, lust; there's no warm coziness. 

I am of the mind that love can be asymmetrical. So even if love slowly grows in the mind and body of one person, it doesn't have to manifest itself in the attracted person. This seems blatantly obvious, but often "love" gets dismissed as childish or as infatuation precisely because it isn't being reciprocated and that in turn is because society is deluded into thinking love is necessarily a two-way transaction, it isn't. When you hit spirituality, one-way love seems to be the higher form, but just to take the joy out of it, it stops being romantic love then and becomes God's love or whatever.

How long does love take to arise? Again, love is not binary, it's a sliding scale from nearly nothing to full on. At the lower levels of love I would say it was difficult to disambiguate it from attraction. This is at it should be: attraction is the preliminary stages of love, they are one and the same thing. All this talk of love and attraction can be taken more generally for things as well as people, but I'm primarily talking about people here. To muddy the waters further because attraction itself comes in various intensities, it can be very hard to recognise if you even are falling in love or could possibly fall in love.

It seems like in the normal state of affairs, there's attraction (possibly asymmetrical), but one person persists in expressing their love and wins over the other person to their way of thinking - so much for every romantic movie ever. But I say there is a falling in love by stealth and innocently: the attraction starts of innocently and nearly subconsciously, but exposure over time cements the attraction and love begins, again mostly subconsciously. Then that love intensifies over time and gets to the point where one day you're sitting there with a cup of tea, and realise "Damn, I can't stop thinking about X. How and why did that happen?". On reflection, that has happened to me a couple of times. And then in the next breath: "Nah. It can't be love, just behave @LastThursday. Save yourself for real love". And if my life were Sleepless in Seattle (it's not), I would go all out and try and consummate my newly discovered love.

I think falling in love in slow motion is much more prevalent and goes unnoticed than is let on, mostly because it's dismissed as not being worthy or real. I object! It's as real and valid as any other form of love, especially romantic love, maybe even more so. Next time you look someone in the eye, ponder if they're in love with you without knowing it.

[LastThursday]

I've kind of become fascinated with colour perception (another phase), ever since I did some self hypnosis and found my perception of certain colours was changed. Specifically blues and purple and pinks became very vibrant. I was surprised by this, how could simple suggestion change my experience of reality?

Anyway, it got me to thinking if it would be possible to perceive new colours, ones never seen before. I was reading about colour opponent theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opponent_process) and something occured to me. When mixing colours it is either additive (light) or subtractive (paints) (https://blog.thepapermillstore.com/color-theory-additive-subtractive-colors/). So you might imagine mixing red and yellow to get orange and green and yellow to get lime. But what about blue and yellow? With paints you would get green, and with light you would get white. Neither are yellowish-blue, the colour doesn't exist in reality (because of opposition in the visual system). How to make this colour then?

Stare at the image below and cross your eyes slightly until the blue box lines up over the yellow box. You may have to get closer or further way to make it easier. At first one colour will win out over the other, just keep blinking. After a bit you get a strange kind of shimmering effect, between the colours mixing. But after a long while things will settle down, and you'll see a yellowish-blue. Welcome to a new colour.

 

 

 

[LastThursday]

Is our mental life completely disconnected from our bodies? It's an odd thought that your body could just be some sort of avatar, devoid of any inner contemplative life, a container if you like. Sure, the avatars come in all kinds of configurations, but it kind of would be possible to swap one soul for another. This idea isn't new, the idea of a soul that animates lifeless matter is an ancient one.

If you take someone's brain and go look at it, it's just a grey mess of neurons. One neuron is pretty much the same as another (within reason). It's not as if there's a neuron for yellow, some neurons for Kylie Minogue and others for the taste of bourbon. There's no possible way the stuff of brains makes our subjective experience. Not unless some diabolical process is happening whereby the patterns of neuronal connections and their activity are leading to consciousness. I mean, brains are bodies right, it's all avatar, empty and devoid of consciousness. One brain is pretty much the same as another brain. 

Yet, we have the strange situation where our avatars are pinned to our consciousness. There's a high correlation there. In certain situations we may temporarily forget about our avatars, but they always seem to come back. Examining it, the whole set up is really quite peculiar. Here goes:

Here is a world, for all intents and purposes infinite in extent. It is a world, it has structure and orderliness, it can be explored, it is consistent from moment to moment. So why not just stop there? Why the rigmarole with having a body and all its problems? Literally a middle-man to relay communications from one world to the other mental world. It's like the body was engineered as an interface, part physical, part mental. 

The only conceivable use for a body in this scheme, is to restrict freedom of exploration right down. We have invented cars and aircraft precisely to overcome the restrictions of the body. So where exactly is the point where the mental world touches the physical world?

The real diabolicalness is that the physical world is couched directly inside the mental experience. It only takes some re-contextualisation to realise this (possible awakening, but I think you don't need to go that far). Even a materialist would have to concede that reality "out there" is being interpreted by a brain, it's just a map of the real thing, our conscious experience is nothing like reality. And idealist would simply say that it's all consciousness - basically the same conclusion as the materialists. 

So it seems like consciousness has different types of activity that are somehow connected to each other. There is the seeming activity of the physicality of a brain (neurones and all), and then the correlated ethereal activity of mental life, so much so that if you damage a brain, the mental activity changes in lockstep. In a sense you're comparing oranges and oranges, it's all consciousness that is the explanation, there is no interface. But that seems unsatisfactory. Mental activity and qualia are so different from a lump of gooey grey brain, how can the two possibly be interfaced to each other? What is the linkage between the two?

One less obvious explanation lies in relativity. If consciousness is about anything it is about relative intensity and relative difference of phenomena. Red only looks red in comparison to something that is not red. If everything were red, then well, there would be no red. Sight is not sound because they are in opposition to each other, up is not down and so on. This is the origin of qualia. This is the sum total of awareness; awareness is noticing difference. Consciousness is hugely elaborate, but it is done by intricately elaborating relative differences. Seen from a different viewpoint, awareness is a symmetry breaking activity. Symmetry in this case means sameness. When you become aware of a new phenomenon in consciousness, you are breaking the previous symmetry. 

So consciousness is a symmetry breaking machine, it creates stuff from nothing, it creates difference from sameness. Is this enough to explain qualia? Nearly. It's very obvious the world of consciousness phenomena has orderliness and structure, which is born from differences. It's like painting by numbers: before you fill in the colours the picture still exists, there is already structure there. My intuition is that the "filling in" of structure in conscious experience is arbitrary. The startling conclusion would be that your conscious experience maybe similar in structure, but absolutely different in perception to mine. The "filling in" nature of qualia is utterly inexplicable, like asking two different children to colour in the same picture, how they choose to do it is random (but consistent).

It's possible the filling in process is in fact completely random and just gets baked in through repetition. So the experience of the colour green becomes habituated, but its first instance was completely random, plucked from an array of all possible types of conscious phenomena. It would seem that the only proviso is that similar structures in consciousness get similar qualia attached. So red and green only occur in vision, not sound for example (although see synaesthesia). Red and green are similar in some ways. 

So in essence the brain is responsible for ferreting out structure from the world - through its dense network of neurones, and this structures conscious experience, but the attachment of qualia (filling in) to this structure is not done by the brain. After all, if the brain is doing anything at all it's very clear that it is a pattern recognition machine. 

To extend this idea, maybe any and all structure in the world (outside of brains) gets qualia attached to them (initially random for a new structure). The question then remains is there an entity whose consciousness is experiencing this world without using a brain? Yes, but it's more diffuse and sprawling than a brain. In a way our brains are all part of the same thing, but their dense structure concentrates pattern recognition to a high level, making it seem like we're singular entities disconnected from each other. But this is not the case, we are connected to each other diffusely through the other structure recognising entities in the world. The universe is a giant brain, and we're part of it - it's all consciousness.

Edited September 3, 2021 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

Never post anything whilst drunk.

I think it's informative to try and be coherent in different states of consciousness. The informativeness comes through because reality isn't actually coherent at all, it's a maelstrom of chaos in a constant rush. It's so easy to slip in your footing and become crazed and incoherent, reality is constantlty forcing you that way anyway. Spirituality and self-development doesn't actually make any sense whatsoever. Why don't you want to wake up? Because it's insanity - scary type insanity - real reality is scary insanity. It's all over the forum and the journals, the constant toying with insanity, right there on your doorstep. Yes, no, yes, no. Being authentic is to be relatively insane - sane by your own standards, insane by everyone else's.

What we all really want is to be ourselves, our insane, unrestricted, un-owned selves. To do and think and behave as we truly want. To not be slaves, to be free like birds, and cats. We are prisoners of our own minds. So much for alcohol.

For some chaos, I'm going to learn this:

 

[LastThursday]

More chaos:

Speak, listen, hush, prison, expression, suppresion, supplication, interrogation, -tion, -tion, -tion,

Spell, wish, extinguish, anguish, impish, impudence, improper, impoverished, -shed, -shed, -shed,

I, you, me, he, miss, sir, madam, doctor, duke, lady, address, impress, heiress, dress, -ess, -ess, -ess.

 

[LastThursday]

Before the thought you just had arose, what was before? Was it nothing? Did nothing exist? Maybe what was before was everything. And now it's a different everything. That thought didn't arise, it wasn't erupted from nothing, it blossomed from everything, in one fluid motion. Everything was involved in making that thought. The very marble of that thought was sculpted from the everything. The thought had the purpose of the universe behind it and it's source unimaginably complex, even if the thought was simple and plain.